[title type="h5"]Wednesday, August 27, 2013.
The Dozen Best Dinners Of My Life. One Of Those.[/title]
Suddenly high on my list of writing projects for the near future is a series describing the most amazing dinners to ever pass my lips. What gets me thinking about that is my dinner tonight at Square Root, in which sixteen gourmets and oenophiles ingested fourteen courses while sampling sixteen wines from the great Australian winery Penfolds.
I am a paying ($200) guest of a group organized by my longtime friend and Australian wine authority Dr. Bob DeBellevue. His personal collection of Penfolds wines is so fine that even the winery is impressed by it. Its agent in Napa, DLynn Proctor, came to town with some Penfolds rarities and a vast store of information about these and Dr. Bob's own selection.
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Chef Philip Lopez in the Square Root kitchen.[/caption]
Meanwhile, Square Root's chef-owner Philip Lopez barely surrounds the wines with his maximum current offering, a dinner served at his combination kitchen counter-dining room, to as many people as it would hold.
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Above the Square Root dining area.[/caption]
Like all other superlative pleasures of life, this evening will never be repeated except at an absurd price and as a parody of itself. Tonight was the one and only.
I find dinners like this difficult to write about. The more words I use, the less well they describe the realities. Not even photos of the food capture them. And there's no recording mechanism for the wine experience. (This is why almost all wine writing is numbingly boring and repetitive.)
The best I can do is transcribe the menu, adding personal notes wherever I think they are needed to unlock the delightful culinary puzzles for which the chef is celebrated. I also add comments from others at the counter, particularly those of Warren Frederick, a longtime fellow wine taster and friend who landed next to me.
No tablecloths. No table, really, just the aforementioned counter, its shape that of a large parenthesis. The placemats are made of black slate, and flanked with gadgets designed to hold the utensils in place. And no bread, of course. Virtually every particle of food bigger than a flake of salt is mentioned in the menu descriptions.
The entire cooking operation went forward inside of the parenthesis. The guests watch it all, including the flaky parts. (I will never be convinced that adding ingredients with tweezers--an operation performed often at Square Root--is anything by risible.) Allegedly this obviates the need for a lot of explanations, but in fact I often find myself in search of whats, hows and whys. The info is gladly given, because there really is a reason for every addition to the plate.
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16 Penfolds wines, most of great rarity.[/caption]
We do have wine glasses. Two at a time, not the usual phalanx. (That would have required 256 glasses.) Except for the first two courses, the whole business of wine pairing was more or less ignored. I have no problem with that. Virtually all food goes with all wine. Anyway, the main wine show was about the subtleties uniting and separating the fourteen big Australian reds, ranging equally across two decades, vintages 1990 to 2010.
And away we go.
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Lobster ballottine.[/caption]
Gilded Indian Lobster Curry Cups
Forbidden black rice, curried lobster foam, lobster ballottine. [The gilding was a flake of real gold. A ballottine is one bird--or lobster, in this case--stuffed inside another. Taste: lobstery.] Here was the only white wine of the night, just where it was needed.
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The Muffuletta transformed.[/caption]
"Face" Bacon & Nduja Muffuletta
Olive salad, pecorino piccata espuma, toasted sesame meringue. [The bacon is hog jowl, or Italian guanciale. Ndujia is a soft, smoky pork pâté, also Italian, and very much in vogue on the East and West Coasts. The muffuletta aspect was fascinating. The "bread" was hard-baked meringue.] The wine for this was the only light red (Pinot Noir) of the evening.
Southern Picnic
Fried chicken wafer, pickled okra, fried chicken cotton candy. [Finger food, with chicken flavor rendered in two ways. The cotton-candy way is the more interesting, the high point of food transformation in the chef's repertoire.] Three wines came now, united by the story and presence of the St. Henri vineyard, which stretches back to the earliest days of Penfolds.
1871 Oyster
Smoked caviar, dill potatoes, oyster foam. [Served cool and oystery, the ultimate accolade--but still not as good as an unsauced, freshly shucked raw oyster. The 1871 reference tells of the first culture of oysters in local waters.] An oyster with Cabernet-Shiraz blend in the glass? It can be made to work. First step: age the wine twenty-four years. Then. . .
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Above: menudo, step one. Below: menudo, step two.[/caption]
Menudo
Oaxacan green dent hominy, honeycomb tripe, blackened onion. [The tripe aspect was very subtle, but its presence was the ideal thing for. . . ] The 1990 Grange, the flagship wine of Penfolds. We are now well past the point at which over a thousand dollars worth of wine has been served.
Hay Roasted Beets
Pickled lobster mushrooms, apple licorice black pudding, verjus. [Beets have become as necessary at any ambitious dinner as foie gras or beef filet. The black pudding is a blood sausage.] I was glad I still had some Grange in my glass, to say nothing of the bigger Bin 707 Cabernet.
Foie Gras
Roasted pistachio sponge crumble, cardamom beet gel, date chutney. [Right on cue. Duck liver brought to the texture of butter.] The pairing of the night involves two vintages of Cabernet Sauvignon from Block 42, a vineyard grown on actual vitis vinifera rootstock, as in before phylloxera set in through most of the world. Talk about rare wines!
Roasted Hazelnut Conchiglie
Chipotle buttermilk gel, celery root "bark," chanterelles, huitlacoche. [The latter item is a corn fungus, a delicacy in Mexico but a pest in this country. This is the third time I've eaten this in ten days.] The wines are becoming bigger, with more extract and higher alcohol.
Lychee Margarita Ice
Eucalyptus peach umeboshi, lime meringue, fennel pollen. [An exotic take on the old tradition of cleansing one's palate halfway through a complex dinner.]
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Lobster mole at Square Root[/caption]
Lobster Chilaquiles Verde
Queso fresco, lobster molé, bergamot crema, charred onion. [My favorite dish from the test run of this dinner two weeks ago, and it's that good again. But the second lobster in the dinner?] The focus of the attendees unambiguously shifts from the food to the wine. A few women are saying that they are full.
Rabbitchetta
Panisse mousse, blistered tomato conserva, charred eggplant harissa. [The bread course, sort of. We need something like that to catch up on the accumulation of red wine.]
Charred Wagyu Short Rib
Heirloom beet, miso, hazelnut pomace, bone marrow soubise. [You can't have a big dinner without a steak. I like it better than the first time.] The big reds are in their perfect milieu.
Apple Sorrel Sorbet
Tarragon sabayon, puffed grain, frozen horchata, apple meringue. [I don't know whether this sounds normal after twelve preceding like-minded courses, or because it really is.]
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Crispy milk and other dessert classics.[/caption]
Toasted Almond Nitro Macaroon
Egg yolk caramel ice cream, crispy milk, candied almonds. [Except for the liquid nitrogen use in the preparation, it sounds like something you'd get at Antoine's. No, wait. Crispy milk? Yes. All right. Enough. Even though all the courses were sub-tapas size, I still feel almost uncomfortably full.]
Here are all the wines, in the order served. Most of them overlapped courses.
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2010 Penfolds Yattarna Chardonnay
1999 Penfolds Cellar Reserve Pinot Noir
1990 Penfolds St. Henri Shiraz
1990 Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz
1990 Penfolds Bin 90A Cabernet Shiraz
1990 Penfolds Bin 920 Cabernet Shiraz
1990 Penfolds Grange Shiraz
1996 Penfolds Bin 707 Cabernet
1996 Penfolds Block 42 Cabernet (natural roots, no phylloxera)
2004 Penfolds Block 42 Cabernet
2004 Penfolds Bin 60 A Cabernet Shiraz
2005 Penfolds Cellar Reserve Cabernet Shiraz
2008 Penfolds Bin 620 Cabernet Shiraz
2010 Penfolds Bin 169 Cabernet
2010 Penfolds Bin 150 Shiraz
2010 Penfolds Bin 170 Cabernet Shiraz
Consider this the first in the new series My Dozen Finest Dinners. I won't know the exact ranking until I decide on the other eleven.
[title type="h5"]Square Root. Lower Garden District: 1800 Magazine St. 504-309-7800. [/title]